Last week it was announced that Sony now has a new US$150 option to add user-defined gridlines to the A7 Mark IV (and eventually other bodies). This was immediately re-dubbed "greedlines" by Internet hooligans.
Frankly, I think Sony may have finally hit upon the correct way for add-on costs: user-specific features.
Sony has attempted this "get more money from the customer" strategy before: the old PlayMemories apps were a misguided attempt to sell common features other camera makers were including in cameras, such as Timelapse. Sony not only fumbled the PlayMemories apps they created, but they also made it impossible for others to create apps. Which, as you'll remember from 2007, was one of the three primary core functions I requested for future cameras ("Programmable").
The Japanese camera companies still haven't figured out what the Western tech companies figured out way back in the 80's: you build a platform that enables an ecosystem, you don't try to create everything in the ecosystem. Ultimately, the ecosystem broadens the platform and makes it more attractive.
That means you have to define what the "base platform" really is. Anything beyond that should be an add-on extra, which in an ideal world should be able to come from anywhere. Sony's still violating that "anywhere" bit, but it seems that they're the ones that have come closest to defining how far they will go with the base platform.
We've had tastes of this before, most notably with video codecs (which can be a real cost to the camera maker that they need to recover). Not every camera purchaser needs the latest advanced video capabilities, after all. I'm a little surprised that none stuck with selling those advanced capabilities (e.g. x-Log, raw video, anamorphic, open gate, etc.) as a licensed addition (Panasonic sort of does that by separating the S5 II from the S5 IIX model). However, it very well may have been a bean-counter decision: spreading the costs over more users gives you a faster and more guaranteed payback.
I can see some clear cleavage points between what I'd call a complete base camera and a useful extension for a subset of users. Nikon's Auto capture function for the Z9 is one of those. In their panic over slipping market share, I'm guessing that Nikon decided that adding this was a strong competitive marketing message more than something that needed a direct payback and applied to all customers. The number of users that actually could/would make use of Auto capture is actually a bit low. It enables a few of us to do some things we want to do, but it's overly complex and doesn't have enough application for most users. It's on the side of the platform line I'd call "sell as an extra." But if Nikon were to sell that function, that would require a whole infrastructure of its own when the primary advantage of creating it probably was "no other camera maker has this function."
Nikon gets it wrong in other ways, too. NX MobileAir and NX Field are two that come to mind. Charging a user for storing things on their own device (NX MobileAir) is as stupid as it gets in the software business, while NX Field requires joining a secret society that doesn't have a public admission process.
Nevertheless, I think that the handwriting is on the wall: to survive the coming era of dedicated cameras, the camera companies are going to have to come to grips with ecosystem, and realize that there is safety in "playing with others" as well as "not overextending the base platforms."
You start down that path by looking at a specific thing in your customer support stream—okay, you need customer support first ;~)—and that's identifying sub-set user requests. Custom gridlines are one of those. Custom ML-taught subject detection might be another. Indeed, I can come up with a list of about two dozen of these things, all of which would create revenue without having to completely remake a camera. I'm not going to list them all here, as perhaps by playing coy one of the camera makers that read my site will reach out to try to pry such a list out of me, and I'd need that foot in the door to help steer things to the right cleavage point.
I have an article I've written that will be published elsewhere on the more general problem here: when you have a relatively fixed size market and you saturate it, there are only a few strategies you can use to grow your business and profits. In other words, you eventually run out of "more customers," plus you can only use "increase price" so much, thus you need alternative strategies to feed the shark. If you've been paying attention, Netflix and other streaming companies are running into this very problem. Magazines and newspapers died because they didn't figure this out or address it soon enough. But virtually every industry and company has this ongoing problem.
Camera makers are vulnerable because no one requires a camera any more. That's the real message from smartphones. It's not so much that smartphones are great cameras—some are decent—it's that the purpose served by the majority of dedicated cameras has been usurped. Thus, the issue for camera companies is how big is the market that doesn't require a camera but still wants one, and how do you maximize your results with that group?
Sony's been poking at that problem for awhile now (not that they've been very successful at figuring it out in other saturated consumer electronics markets ;~). The gridlines-for-dollars is just the tip of a potential iceberg.
